“If you get one percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.”
James Clear
Curiosity and lifelong learning are among businesses’ top 10 skills priorities for 2027, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023. I find it significant that the phrase is “lifelong learning” rather than “continuous learning.” Yes, there is a difference!
Lifelong learning is defined as the pursuit of knowledge for professional and personal reasons, whereas continuous learning is concentrated on maintaining and improving professional skills over time and emphasizes the need to stay current in your existing profession.
Lifelong learning focuses on the whole person. It can be related to personal fulfilment, societal development, or adapting to changes in the world. Lifelong learning can include attending workshops, taking up new hobbies, learning new skills unrelated to your job, and pursuing further education – at any age.
Using this phrase shows me that top employers understand that employees bring their whole selves to work and that having a broad knowledge of unrelated subjects, with interests outside of work, can be a great basis for innovation and can prevent burnout.
That’s why Executive Support Magazine features articles on a broad range of topics; we also believe in lifelong learning. By providing you with different points of view and different topics in each issue, we aim to increase your knowledge across many areas.
So, just as you need to think strategically in your business role, you need to think strategically in your learning and development. But you don’t need to learn everything all at once; slow and steady wins the race.
Aim to embed one new piece of learning into your workflow each week.
Take our cover story, for example: Prompt Engineering: The Art of Crafting Great Questions by Fiona Young. Fiona has provided a framework and some useful tips for crafting AI prompts, as well as access to a prompt bank to start you off. Choose one of the prompts to help you with a task that you are working on and refine it, tailor it, and make it your own, saving it for future reference to use again.
You could take one of the options from Heather Denniston’s article, Productivity Hacks to Amplify Personal Wellbeing, try it, build it into your routine, and then choose another one. Or, read our profile on the wonderful Margot Roache-Greene, whose administrative career has spanned an amazing 63 years. And, if you are logged into the Executive Support Magazine website at https://executivesupportmagazine.com/, you can also save those articles to your dashboard to read later with the “save to library” button at the bottom of each article.
We understand that finding time in your day to read all the articles in a single issue of the magazine can be challenging, which is why we created the Take Five newsletter. Each week we highlight five articles – a mixture of the most recent and some from our archives – so that you can choose one article a day to read when you take five minutes for a break with your favourite beverage. Use this link to sign up for the newsletter: https://executivesupportmagazine.com/#newslettersignup
You can also contact me at editor@executivesupportmedia.com if you need help finding the information you need.
We are here to support your learning journey.
Kathleen
